The Quintessential Inessential Thing:
Thoughts on the Watch Industry and an Invitation to
an Amateur Watch Course

Mark Argetsinger 

For one with a keen interest in the history of technology, there is a level of discomfort in coming to terms with the historical intermingling of horology and jewelry-making, of utility and luxury, of science and fashion. The ancient structure of watchmaking—as with jewelry-making and artistic endeavors generally—is the collaboration between patron and the artist/craftsman. The patron took the form of the Church, royal personages and their court, the upper strata of the bourgeoisie, or even governments (and, today, we have those who have amassed or inherited wealth as an added player). Whereas a jewel is an adornment, the keeping of time is a serious endeavor, and its measurement in the history of technology is the fountainhead of great advances. What follows is a historical sketch of the watch and its journey from an adornment and plaything of the nobility, to an instrument of the greatest scientific advance of the 18th century, to its return as a bauble on the wrist of the newly rich. There is, on the one hand, an unease at what the industry has become, and, on the other, a sanguine view of the continued achievements in the ancient science and art of horology.

The monastery or town tower clocks of the Middle Ages, powered by a ponderous hanging weight, were controlled by the crown and verge escapement with its foliot oscillator that provided its timekeeping abilities, although they were as unsteady as the name implies (‘foliot’ being an Old-French term related to folie, i.e., folly). By the mid-15th century the power provided by a coiled mainspring enabled large clocks to become small watches, even though the verge or anchor escapements still did not enable steady oscillation of the balance wheel. The theoretical insight of Galileo (1564–1642), who saw in the swinging of the pendulum a perfect timekeeper, spurred the practical work of Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695), who around 1657 constructed the first pendulum clock, harnessing the ‘restorative force’ of gravity as a steady and reliable regulator. The theoretician Robert Hooke, in turn, imagined applying ‘artificial gravity’ to the watch’s oscillating balance itself by the addition of an ancillary spring, which system was again worked out by Huygens by the fitting of a spiral hairspring to the balance c. 1675.

The complexity and rarity of timepieces made them from their origins objects afforded to society’s upper strata, princes and those within their train. The coaches of such personages were supplied with the compact travelling clock, in their pockets were superbly made gold-cased watches--—or, for those with a religious or philosophical bent, a memento-mori watch in the shape of a skull. In the 18th century, the sophistication of clockworks amazed and delighted royalty in the form of Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s automata and watches.

Yet it was a practical navigational problem that served as the greatest impetuous to the development and miniaturization of watches: the determination of longitude at sea. The accuracy of the long-case pendulum regulator clocks was advanced by George Graham (1673–1751) in London and perfected by John Harrison (1693–1776) in Lincolnshire. Graham developed his deadbeat escapement and mercury temperature-compensated pendulum and Harrison his grasshopper escapement and ingenious grid-iron pendulum whose bi-metalic components kept in step with changes in temperature. The thinkers of Ancient Greece and the Western polymaths of the 18th century understood that the regularity of the celestial bodies could be mimicked by clockwork. The Earth itself is a clock, whose meridian lines divide its surface into 360° by 15° increments that total 24 hours. A clock, if only it could be accurate at sea, would provide the simplest means to determine a ship’s longitude while plying the ocean’s wide trackless way. This was foreseen by the prescient speculation of Gemma Frisius in his De principiis astronomiæ (1530), where he described the use of ‘little clocks.’ By contrast, the theoretician’s preferred method, the determination of lunar distances, required accurate sightings of the moon on the pitching deck of a ship, and then a full four hours (at its shortest duration) of a ‘computer’s’ calculations (that is, the navigator who sat in the wardroom by candlelight to scratch out his sums, consulting his tables of lunar distances). When John Harrison’s fourth attempt at applying the accuracy of the land-based regulator clock to the tempest-tossed marine chronometer turned from a clock to a watch (Harrison’s H4), the miniaturization of accurate time began in earnest—and this employing the relatively crude verge escapement, albeit with Harrison’s cleverly wrought diamond pallets. In fact, Harrison was the first to use jeweled bearings extensively throughout the watch. Harrison fulfilled the terms of Queen Anne’s Act of Longitude of 1714, with an accuracy down to less than half a degree, even though the terms and payment of the 20,000 pound reward were disputed, slow in coming, and never paid in full. A copy of H4 made by Larcum Kendall (K1) sailed with James Cook on his three voyages of discovery in the Endeavour, and he referred to it as ‘my trusted friend.’ Another copy sailed with William Bligh on his infamous voyage in the Bounty. Harrison was finally aptly memorialized in 2006 with a stone in Westminster Abbey, near the graves of George Graham and Thomas Tompion; the memorial incorporates a bi-metalic temperature compensative strip of his invention.

The subsequent development of the marine chronometer was furthered by Thomas Mudge, who also invented the lever escapement, Pierre Le Roy, who pioneered the ‘detached’ escapement, Ferdinand Berthoud, and the Englishmen John Arnold and Thomas Earnshaw, who vied for the development of the detent escapement and applying temperature compensation directly to the balance wheel through the bi-metalic, adjustable-weight balance. The design of the marine chronometer took the shape of the gimbal-mounted, double-boxed clock produced by such famed makers as Breguet, Ulysse Nardin, Thomas Mercer, and Hamilton in order to supply the navies of the world. In addition to these standard clocks, elegant pocket chronometers were made to sit within the captain’s waistcoat pocket. 

Arising in parallel to these developments of the watch as a scientific instrument, the nascent Swiss industry grew hand in hand with the work of the jewelers. The Geneva Calvinists enacted luxury laws in 1560 that proscribed the wearing of jewels (lois somptuaires) and jewelers and gold- and silver-smiths turned to horology when religious objects could not be clothed in the extravagant dress redolent of Rome. But in addition to the skills of the jeweler—with his miniature tools and lathe and work proportioned to the ring or the brooch—what was required was the mathematical knowledge of physics, mechanics, and astronomy in order to construct instruments that would tell the motions of the celestial bodies. Such an adept could work out the equation of time, the phases of the moon, or a perpetual calendar and display them on the dial.

Jean-Antoine Lépine’s (1720–1814) new calibre reduced the bulk of the watch with the use of a single mainplate and attendant bridges. This development of the watch was further refined by Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747–1823), whose genius and artistry was brought to bear upon the watch in two dimensions: the technical and the aesthetic. On the technical side, one can see the legacy of the marine chronometer: a bi-metalic balance that controls the effects of changes in temperature, weighted on its rim with adjustable screws to control its inertia; the pallet lever escapement, which would be refined by the Swiss into a system found in nearly every mechanical watch made since the 19th century; and jeweled bearings. To this established form Breguet & Co. worked out the following improvements that remain fundamental to today’s watch: Breguet teeth (the ratchet gears of the winding system) and, following Abraham-Louis’s death, the keyless winding system; a prototypical automatic winding system (perpétuelle watches); a prototypical anti-shock system for the balance staff (pare-chute—which Breguet demonstrated to astonished onlookers at Talleyrand’s salon by dropping a watch to the floor); the complication of a perpetual calendar; the Breguet overcoil of the balance’s hairspring (which corrects deficiencies inherent in Huygen’s flat spiral spring); the development of a wristwatch (made for Caroline, Queen of Naples); and the tourbillon mechanism, which is of such allure that it remains a feature of the haute-horlogerie watches today. As to the design of watches, Breguet placed his mechanisms within a livery of such understated elegance, such fine elaboration, that his designs remain unsurpassed. Breguet’s taste and style are the apex and benchmark of neoclassical sophistication: the delicately guillochéd gold cases and silvered dials, the blued or gold Breguet hands (an elegant variant of Lépine’s aiguilles à pomme), and the retrograde and moonphase indications.

Following the World Wars, the wristwatch was no longer just a lady’s ornament, but, through its use as a tool by the belligerents on opposing sides—the stop lever or ‘hack’ enabled coordination of watches and thus the coordination of maneuvers—it became an object for the wrist, permanently dictating the watch’s miniaturization. In contradistinction to the classical design of a watch developed by Breguet there arose the chronographs of the pilot, sailor, soldier, diver, and racer. These practical devices glory in form following function and their beauty derives from their scales of measurement (the chronicling of elapsed time, the rotational timing bezel, tachymeter, telemeter, pulsometer, and the slide-rule function); or from their large hands, uncluttered dials with large indices, both for the sake of legibility and both charged with luminescence; the sturdiness of their steel cases, which are water resistant and able to withstand fathoms of seas. The panache of such associated activities adds luster to the urban office-dweller whose Rolex Submariner may never swim the deep. These utility watches can be seen prefigured in the superb marine chronometer pocket watches of the 18th- and 19th-century commanders.

Meantime, the Swiss industry went from the role of horological pirates in the 18th century—counterfeiting the then dominant English and French watches—to the production of precise, useful clocks and watches in the 19th, often working out innovative designs in the cottage workshops of the Jura mountains. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, when the Swiss gradually took on the American system of manufacture that was pioneered by the Waltham and Elgin watch companies—with its interchangeable and standardized parts and its machine tool and die manufacturing—the culture of hand watchmaking, precision, and finishing still inhered and the elite nature of the Swiss watch has never lost its cachet. Throughout the transformation of the Swiss industry from cottage workshops to industrial factories, the legacy of the hand-made object, fashioned with the jeweler’s saw and lathe, engraved and finished by the goldsmith, still adheres to an item made of stamped, milled, and machined parts, often assembled in line at a modern factory.

And yet today one’s computer or smart phone has reached a level of temporal precision unattainable in a mechanical timepiece. Mechanical masterpieces are also bested by a Timex, whose quartz system can be had for a pittance. These facts have rendered mechanical movements the quintessential inessential thing, for, from this point forward, what else could such an item be? Of course, this is the origin of the crisis in the mechanical watch industry of the 1970s and 80s and its turn toward an unabashedly luxury niche.

The vast economic inequities of societies feed the phenomenon of haute horlogerie. In Abraham-Louis Breguet’s day, it was the kings and queens of Europe that purchased his exquisite wares and now the newly minted rich in America, China, and the Middle East serve that role. The Swiss industry embraced wholesale the high-end luxury industry in the 20th and 21st centuries. And, into the bargain, with the recent rise of the watch groups or conglomerates, the ancient link between horology and jewelry has become inextricably intermixed with the worlds of haute couture, luxury leather goods, accessories, fragrances, and cosmetics. Strange bedfellows indeed.

The Swatch Group, Biel/Bienne, founded by Nicholas G. Hayek (1928–2010), concentrates on watchmaking and owns, among other brands, Blancpain; Breguet; Glasshütte Original; Hamilton; Harry Winston; Jaquet Droz; Longines; Mido; Omega; Rado; and Tissot. The success of the quartz Swatch watch, ironically, allowed the subsidizing of its luxury brands and, in many ways, Nicholas G. Hayek is considered the savior and grand patron of today’s Swiss mechanical watch industry. We must also thank Swatch for the ‘resurrected’ brands important in the history of horology: Breguet (as Swatch Breguet advertises, ‘depuis 1775’), Jacquet Droz, and Blancpain.

The LVMH Group (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, SE), Paris, in addition to wines and spirits, perfumes, cosmetics, and fashion and leather goods (including Christian Dior Couture, Céline, Givenchy, and Louis Vuitton) owns the watch brands Bulgari, Chaumet, Fred, Hublot, TAG Heuer, and Zenith (with New York’s Tiffany & Co. now in the offing). LVMH’s captain, Bernard Arnault, has amassed his conglomerate of luxury brands by functioning as a canny Wall-Street-style corporate raider.

The Richemont Group, Geneva, founded by the South African tobacco family Rupert, owns the watch brands A. Lange & Söhne; Piaget; Baume & Mercier; IWC Schaffhausen; Jaeger-LeCoultre; Panerai; Roger Dubois; Vacheron Constantin, as well as the jewelry/accessory brands Cartier, Dunhill, and Montblanc, Van Cleef & Arpels, each of which has developed high-end watches.

The Kering Group, Paris, in addition to Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, and Dodo, owns the watch brands Girard-Perregaux, JeanRichard, and the renowned Ulysse Nardin.

The practice of chablonnage—assembling Swiss parts to create a branded watch (a chablon is a disassembled watch)—was pioneered by, among other companies in other countries, Bulova in the U.S. and Seiko and Citizen in Japan. This practice was continuously blocked by the Swiss in the 20th century and the attempt at Swiss control continues today by the Swatch Group’s restriction on the sale of parts and ébauches and by Swiss regulatory commission restriction on the sale of ébauches. Significantly, within the conglomerates, the Swatch Group is a powerhouse that has gathered into its fold the disparate manufacturing of the assortments of the watch, but first and foremost, Swatch’s ébauche manufacturer ETA supplies mechanical and quartz movements to brands throughout the world. In addition, Swatch owns the following concerns: five firms specializing in watch assemblies; a factory specializing in hairsprings; another in screws, gears, and crowns; one that fabricates watch jewels and sapphire glasses; Moebius, the watch lubricant company; two manufactories produce watch dials; three, watch cases; one, watch hands; a jewelry division specializes in the setting of diamonds and gems in the case and dial; and four firms specialize in microelectronics, from integrated circuits, batteries, to quartz crystals, and one is devoted to sports timing. Swatch operates two boutique chains for its brands as well, Hour Passion and Tourbillon Boutiques. Thus Swatch maintains both a vertical integration within its own brands, as well as control of the other groups, since it supplies its ébauches and parts to brands within all the groups, cementing control of the industry within Switzerland.

Unique in the industry, such brands as Patek Phillipe, Rolex, Audemars Piguet, or Parmigiani Fleurier have managed to remain relatively independent entities. Rolex, founded in London by a German engaged in the practice of chablonnage of Swiss movements (formerly, Wilsdorf and Davis), subsequently moved to Geneva and has now became synonymous with Swiss quality. Rolex and other makers made of the watch a robust and water-resistant item, and Rolex, when first introducing its oyster case in 1926, vividly displayed the fact by placing it within fish bowls in jewelers’ windows. Patek Phillipe, beginning in 1932, was turned by the Stern family from reputable house into an industry giant, using the Calatrava series as its bread and butter in a variety of designs and sizes. As a dress watch, one can think of nothing more elegant than the gold Calatrava Ref. 3520 (1973) with the Clous de Paris (‘hobnail’) guilloché bezel.

With the rise of the luxury niche, the tool-watch has become the sports watch on wrists of the rich at their playgrounds. Various highly capitalized sporting activities are sponsored by various brands for purposes of their advertising: Formula 1 motorsport (Rolex, TAG Heuer, Richard Mille); yachting (Rolex, Audemars Piguet, TAG Heuer); golf (Rolex, Omega, TAG Heuer); tennis (Longines, Rolex); polo and equestrian (Longines, Rolex, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Piaget); or the more proletariat associations of Omega with the timing of sporting events generally, especially the Olympics. Hublot and TAG Heuer sponsor FIFA and the NBA, which represents Jean-Claude Biver’s push for a larger customer base. Similarly, Tissot sponsors such sports as Basketball, Ice Hockey, NASCAR, and motorcycle racing, and Tudor, rugby football. Whereas Georges-Frédéric Roskopf’s pin-lever escapement watch, with its simplified and stamped parts and faux-silver case—marketed in fact in 1867 as La Prolétaire—was an inexpensive watch, Biver means to sell an expensive watch to the rising proletariat.

To survive and flourish, watch companies need to appeal to a broad pool of potential customers, and the means to that end is advertising. Advertising’s aim is to plant within the human breast an ineluctable desire for an object. Today, a watch catalogue pictures elegant models and, the highest advertising prize, celebrities. The brand ambassador is meant to cause the potential purchaser to reason ‘Were I to own this brand, then among my peers would be numbered movie, entertainment, and sport stars, or even astronauts’ (or, in the case of Blancpain or Tudor, Navy Seals). Take, for example, a recent catalogue of Longines collection, a longstanding and important brand. The catalogue’s sub-title is ‘Elegance is an attitude,’ which meaningless phrase is meant to explain photo spreads of three celebrity models, whose ‘grace and purity are the very essence of elegance, they reveal an instinctive and timeless seductiveness,’ and ‘from east to west, radiate talent and natural elegance’ (these ladies’ predecessor at Longines was Audrey Hepburn). A watch enthusiast would wish instead that watch catalogues were shorn of the techniques of the advertising agency and straightforwardly featured the sensuous curves of, say, the swan’s neck regulator, and explicated and pictured the watches themselves (the German watch companies of A. Lange & Söhne or Sinn, for example, are exemplary in this regard).

The legacy of this dual development of the watch—as a useful object and as an item of luxury—brings about the melancholy fact that few will be able to treasure a moonphase Breguet Classique, an A. Lange & Söhne Datograph, or a Patek Philippe chronograph. A person of the middle class may be counted lucky to own a home (that is, be a debtor to a bank through the instrument of a mortgage) and an automobile, but cannot at the same time hoard a timepiece that costs as much or more than a home or an automobile. There is a disparity of scale here; after all, a bag is just a bag and watch a watch, no matter their luxury branding. The million shall have to live their lives foregoing such exquisite pleasures; it has ever been so.

Yet the unseemly ostentation of the nouveau riche uncomfortably emphasizes these economic inequities. In particular, this flaunting of luxury may be seen when watch brands feel compelled to encrust their wares with diamonds. As an embarras de richesses, women’s watches seem to be encrusted with gems de rigueur. Because of association with such jewelry brands as Cartier, Tiffany, Jacob & Co., Van Cleef & Arpels, and Harry Winston (sometime owner of the Hope Diamond), gems are featured with most watch brands as a matter of course, and nearly universally in watches meant to be given women who are, as a recent Breguet catalogue expressed it, the ‘poet’s muse.’ One of sober mind may be willing to pay for a perpetual calendar complication or minute repeater mechanism, but not an aggressively encrusted bauble of a jewel-watch. This is a confusion of jewelry and horology (in a reversal, Harrison’s pivot-bearing gems have travelled to the case as a mere adornment).

The watch groups and their stable of brands compete to inflate the price and profits in the industry. There are those brands, in addition to important historical houses, that hope to profit in the production of a designed case, dial, and hands—employing, say, ETA ébauches—that partake of the luxury price points (this fact is the origin of Swatch’s restriction of its sale of ETA ébauches). Luxury inflation also has a knock-on effect on all ancillary aspects of the watch, from parts and servicing, to watchmaker’s tools, and even to the straps. Then there is Richard Mille, which brand’s extravagant prices seem to be a selling points in and of themselves, to a certain clientele. One senses a bit of a ‘gold rush’ mentality when brands such as Ralph Lauren, Chanel, Hermès, and Louis Vuitton all must have their line of branded Swiss watches to be sold through their boutiques at haute-horlogerie prices (and brands routinely buy back unsold goods in order to preserve and protect their price point). On the other hand, it must be said that certain brands also underwrite the development and creation of truly innovative designs by independent watchmakers. One may be willing to pay for the best materials, engineering, craftsmanship, and design, but wristwatches carry the super-added costs of the luxury niche. Jewelry maisons, the denizens of women and their desires, learned early on that their market could be doubled with the addition of the man’s adornment, the watch. Watch companies would rather market jewels than tools, for the former can command a price at a higher stratum. Thus watch-tools have become a fashion accessory, arrayed in the glass cases of the jewelry boutique with the diamond ring, the pearl necklace, or the bracelet.

In 2016, Swatch, in an effort to safeguard its virtual monopoly, restricted the sale of spare parts, under the guise of controlling quality of servicing. While, on the face of it, it may seem reasonable to control the after-sale service of one’s product, the reality is that this embargo has severed long-standing relationships with material suppliers (such as Cousins Material House in the United Kingdom and Otto Frei in the United States) and independent watchmakers throughout the world, whose business is the service and repair of these watches. Rolex has long since strictly controlled the after-sales aspects of its watches, and other watch groups and their brands have generally followed Swatch. The establishment of the Watchmakers of Switzerland Training and Educational Program (wostep) in the 1960s was a means to this end, but to restrict watchmakers to participation in this program and the dictates of procurement of specified tools and workshop layout in order to be designated an approved service provider, represented an unrealistic outlay of funds for a majority of small shops, driving them out of business. Controlling a watch’s after-sale servicing and repair makes it rather like the goose that lays the golden egg—a perpetual source of revenue.

Recently, Switzerland’s Competition Commision (comco/weko), has intervened even more dramatically in the supply of Swiss movements by limiting the sales of ETA ébauches to large companies, such as Tudor and Breitling, so as to induce those companies to produce movements in house. This has resulted in the rise of such ébauche manufacturers as Sellita and Soprod and, notably, others outside Switzerland. The wisdom of this strong-arm interference in the market is yet to be seen, but the immediate effect has been to disrupt the availability of parts and materials to small concerns and especially to concerns outside of Switzerland in an ongoing effort to block chablonnage. The Swiss are presently in danger of valuing their horological heritage and industry to such a degree that their continued attempts at absolute control may result in unintended but nevertheless detrimental consequences.

In my case, desire for a watch is an unresolved pull between distaste in owning expensive jewelry (a frippery) and delight in a horological mechanism (a tool). Had I a superabundance of funds, would I purchase a luxury watch? I would indeed (as my 18th-century self would have sought to own a Breguet). How could such a purchase be justified? One can always justify one’s desires and one could point to the noble heritage of timekeeping engineering that stretches back to the astonishing Antikythera mechanism in Ancient Greece, used as a microcosmic mimic of the cosmological regularity of the heavens. In the end one must admit to simply being bewitched by the science, craft, and art of horology. One views with fascination the change of hour, minute, second, day, date, month, and moon phase in an attempt to understand the plodding, regular, and mundane—yet ever mysterious and cosmic—march of time.

It was in recognition of this fact that the German watchmaker Gerd-Rüdiger Lang introduced the transparent caseback in his Chronoswiss brand; nearly all brands have followed suit (of course, the opaque back of a quartz mechanism discretely secrets its works, for few can love the circuitry, the coil, and the battery of the quartz movement). And, as the highest mechanical draw for the eye, the inclusion of a tourbillon mechanism in top watch brands is now a matter of course, even though Abraham-Louis Breguet introduced the device as a solution to a particular positional-timing problem affecting pocket watches. Who would not relish the addition of this fascinating bit of watchmaking virtuosity, which is show-cased as a marvelous kinetic sculpture? Nonetheless, it is an inevitable fact of human nature that even after one has achieved one’s heart’s desire, satisfaction wanes and fresh desires arise. One watch turns to two, and, thus, that hoarding animal, the collector, is born.

 In fact, from my point of view, a finely made watch represents an ideal of perfection. Its precisely micro-engineered and manufactured parts mimic the revolutions of the stars, and the gleam of its metals—hermetically sealed within its case—mimic the non-corruptibility of the eternal, while its aesthetic dress participates in beauty itself. When one gazes at one’s watch dial, a sort of Platonic world may be seen, one perfect, beautiful, and free from corruption and change. Yet, of course, this is a happy illusion; even the most expensive mechanism is not perfect, and every mechanical watch is subject to gaining or losing time, to wear of its parts, and the degradation of its lubricants. This sober fact is vividly demonstrated when the gold watchcase receives its first dent or scratch in use. Nonetheless, an exquisitely made watch is a potent symbol of that ideal realm of which we sublunary creatures can only dream. To me at least, this inessential item has made itself essential in my daily navigation of this world (something Breguet and his clientele would have well understood).

It is inevitable, moreover, that a timepiece worn on the person—at first in a pocket affixed to a gold chain, or, in the case of a queen, attached to the wrist like a bracelet—would undergo the finishing and design of fine jewelry, employing precious materials and exquisite workmanship. A watch from the Breguet workshop was a handmade object and, as a natural end of the process, each part was ‘finished,’ that is, it was polished, chamfered, decorated, or patterned. This mastery of the art can be seen in certain 19th-century pocket watches, where the exquisite finishing applied to every part would only be seen by the watch repairer. Unlike the historical Breguet watch, however, the parts of today’s high-end watches are mass-produced with automated machine tools, stamping, and computer-driven milling. Thus, a modern high-end watch is not a hand-made object, but a hand-finished one: the legacy of hand workmanship is applied by some brands after the fact in the form of meticulous hand finishing, black polishing, chamfering, and decorating, sometimes with the addition of hand engraving or hand manipulation of a rose engine.

Then at the pinnacle of haute horlogerie, there are the modern-day hand makers. There is the natural desire that arises between the maker and the patron to create something at the apex of the art. When money is no object, the absolute best can be attempted and achieved—one thinks of a Fabergé egg. This can be seen in the creations of such independent hand-watchmakers as the late George Daniels, his protégé Roger W. Smith, Philippe Dufour, or Kari Voutilainen.

I feel happy to live in a world where such marvels of craft and engineering exist. I relish the friendly rivalry of James Ward Packard and Henry Graves Jr. who caused Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin, respectively, to create the world’s most complicated watches. I rejoice that many companies plow at least some of their profits into research and development and that Breguet maintains a workshop in order to repair and preserve the cultural heritage of their eponymous founder. I marvel that Breguet, at the instance of Nicolas G. Hayek, made a replica of the ‘Marie Antoinette’ complication (No. 160), begun by Abraham-Louis in 1783 and not completed until 1802. I applaud the adoption of George Daniels’s co-axial escapement by Omega. I must admit I thrill to the new offerings, the innovations and designs that can result in a high-frequency (10 Hz) magnetic balance, which is suspended in a magnetic field that is otherwise inimical to watches; or a silicon oscillating regulator that replaces the balance wheel and hairspring altogether, vibrating at an astonishing 15 Hz. It gladdens the heart to know that ateliers continue to ply and advance the ancient art of horology and that patrons (customers) continue to fund them. And yet I shall have to live content with the fact that my desiderata will never, alas, grace my wrist.

The author is an amateur watchmaker who has prepared the Level 4 TimeZone Watch Course that enables fellow amateurs and enthusiasts to work with the complex (yet decidedly unrefined and unpolished) parts of the triple-date, moonphase Valjoux (now ETA) 7751 chronograph (www.timezonewatchschool.com/WatchSchool/). This course has now been extensively revised,  corrected and expanded to include the 7750 calibre. The revised course is available for purchase on this website. Combining explanatory text and newly-created technical drawings of both the 7750 and 7751 movements, the materials include an introduction that provides a brief historical sketch of the Valjoux 7750-series calibre and explanations and illustrations that cover the wheel train and motion works, keyless works, chronograph functions, calendar and quickset systems, and self-winding mechanism, as well as providing illustrated parts lists. Then follow annotated step-by-step drawings of the disassembly, assembly and oiling, regulating, and casing of the movements. We have become used to these wondrous tool-watches, but a Lord of the Admiralty would have been astonished to learn that ETA movements are so finely made that they can be adjusted to be certified as chronometers by the laboratories of the Contrôle Officiel Suisse des Chronomètres (COSC).

The mission of this course is to offer to amateur watchmakers an introduction to the world of horology and the chance to gain hands-on knowledge of the micro-mechanics of the wristwatch through the most ubiquitous chronograph movements in the trade. It is one thing to own and enjoy a watch, but only when one has disassembled a movement to its constituent plates, gears, bridges, springs, and screws (the last at the impossibly diminutive height of barely a millimeter), pondered its interplay of parts and ratio of gears, and then re-assembled the cleverly wrought pieces into a beating whole that one can truly gain mechanical sympathy with and some understanding of a timepiece whose basic systems were worked out by ingenious Swiss craftsmen of the Jura mountains in the 19th century. The author has the pleasure of servicing and regulating his relatively low-end, but nonetheless marvelous,Swiss timepieces, even though the Swatch Group will not allow him to buy parts.